Gotta feel bad for SourceForge the new owners reversed the malpractices of its previous owners immediately and yet the damage is permanently done. I'll never understand why some think distributing spyware / malware for money is even remotely right in any way, shape, and form. How is any of it legal half the time...
SourceForge's GitHub Importer
11–20 of 102 posts
Re: SourceForge's GitHub Importer
#12Never trusting SourceForge again. Downloaded FileZilla once and that was it.
Re: SourceForge's GitHub Importer
#13Does anyone still use SourceForge after they started embedding adware with their download links? I give them credit for being an early innovator and I know they are under new management as of 2016 and supposedly put that behind them[1] but they have permanently lost my trust. [1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/under...
I still upload and maintain latest binaries for my project there:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/traccar/
I don't maintain code and description basically refers to GitHub for any issues, but there are still some people who use it, so I don't see any good reason for losing free traffic. Number of download has been falling for years though.
Re: SourceForge's GitHub Importer
#14Gotta feel bad for SourceForge the new owners reversed the malpractices of its previous owners immediately and yet the damage is permanently done. I'll never understand why some think distributing spyware / malware for money is even remotely right in any way, shape, and form. How is any of it legal half the time...
I find it slightly odd that sourceforge is so highly shunned after the malware incidents, while various other large companies [eg. microsoft (dodgy behaviour in skype, etc.), facebook (spying, selling data), lenovo (superfish), etc.] have been caught doing similar dodgy things and yet it feels like the general community has forgiven or at least grudgingly overlooking them.
May or may not be true - that's just the feel I'm getting.
Re: SourceForge's GitHub Importer
#15Gotta feel bad for SourceForge the new owners reversed the malpractices of its previous owners immediately and yet the damage is permanently done. I'll never understand why some think distributing spyware / malware for money is even remotely right in any way, shape, and form. How is any of it legal half the time...
They had to know when they bought it. Can't feel that bad for them, they knew.
Re: SourceForge's GitHub Importer
#16Does anyone still use SourceForge after they started embedding adware with their download links? I give them credit for being an early innovator and I know they are under new management as of 2016 and supposedly put that behind them[1] but they have permanently lost my trust. [1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/under...
It's actually worse than that. As an open-source developer deciding where to host a project, I not only need to trust the host, I also need to expect users to also trust the host. If I expect 10% of potential users to bounce when they see that it's hosted on Sourceforge, well, hosting is enough of a commodity that I have no reason to give up on that 10%.
In addition to the malware issues, when I land on a SourceForge project that pretty much tells me "this project is dead or on life support" nine times out of ten.
Re: SourceForge's GitHub Importer
#17Websense blacklisted Sourceforge after the 2013 DevShare debacle. It has remained blacklisted since. It is blacklisted in many other web application firewalls and content gateways too. Sourceforge is inaccessible from many corporate networks due to this. It will remain inaccessible for many more years to come.
It's unfortunate how Sourceforge, once a leader in the open source community, lost the trust and reputation it built over 14 years in a matter of a few weeks. It may take another 14 years to regain this lost trust and even that may not be enough.
Re: SourceForge's GitHub Importer
#18Gotta feel bad for SourceForge the new owners reversed the malpractices of its previous owners immediately and yet the damage is permanently done. I'll never understand why some think distributing spyware / malware for money is even remotely right in any way, shape, and form. How is any of it legal half the time...
I find it slightly odd that sourceforge is so highly shunned after the malware incidents, while various other large companies [eg. microsoft (dodgy behaviour in skype, etc.), facebook (spying, selling data), lenovo (superfish), etc.] have been caught doing similar dodgy things and yet it feels like the general community has forgiven or at least grudgingly overlooking them. May or may not be true - that's just the fee…
If they start buying up some startups and giving YC an exit or two, the community may forgive SourceForge.
Re: SourceForge's GitHub Importer
#19Gotta feel bad for SourceForge the new owners reversed the malpractices of its previous owners immediately and yet the damage is permanently done. I'll never understand why some think distributing spyware / malware for money is even remotely right in any way, shape, and form. How is any of it legal half the time...
They had to know when they bought it. Can't feel that bad for them, they knew.
Hmm. I wonder what their agenda is.
Not assuming absolute malice, but I am really curious.
Re: SourceForge's GitHub Importer
#20Gotta feel bad for SourceForge the new owners reversed the malpractices of its previous owners immediately and yet the damage is permanently done. I'll never understand why some think distributing spyware / malware for money is even remotely right in any way, shape, and form. How is any of it legal half the time...
I find it slightly odd that sourceforge is so highly shunned after the malware incidents, while various other large companies [eg. microsoft (dodgy behaviour in skype, etc.), facebook (spying, selling data), lenovo (superfish), etc.] have been caught doing similar dodgy things and yet it feels like the general community has forgiven or at least grudgingly overlooking them. May or may not be true - that's just the fee…
We also need to think a little about how the times were. Sourceforge rose to popularity in the early 2000s. Free and open source software (FOSS) was not just a matter of pragmatism or convenience. It was an ideology, a philosophy, and a movement strongly pushed forward by FSF, Open Source Initiative, various LUGs, and various special interest groups. Open source enthusiasts used to have very active and influential LUGs all throughout the world. There used to be free and open source software conferences all over the world with the sole agenda of increasing open source awareness among the general public.
In those years, most of the developers who chose to host their projects on Sourceforge strongly believed in this ideology. GPLv2 was the most popular open source license then. Given all this, it makes sense that those early users who held freedom of software to be sacred were very pissed when Sourceforge decided to bundle closed source adware into the binaries of these open source projects without the explicit permission of these open source developers.
Times have changed a lot since then. GPLv2/v3 license is now considered too restrictive and the MIT license is more popular. Most of the tech community understands the concept of open source more or less. The movement in favor of software freedom has begun to lose momentum. Open source software makes a lot of business sense, so we don't need the push for open source software anymore like we used to in the early 2000s.
Even some people like me who once would run nothing but completely free operating system with free tools have now begun to use proprietary drivers because as we have grown older, got busy, with kids and family, the time spent tinkering with open source drivers is not worth it, we would rather use something that just works. When we use Microsoft and Facebook we know what we are getting into and most of us are more or less okay with it. It's different times and different kinds of users. That explains why Microsoft and Facebook do not get penalized as heavily as Sourceforge did. Sourceforge violated something that was held sacred during those times. Microsoft and Facebook have no notion of sacred-anything.